Governor Reagan c1974
“California’s been good to me.
Hope it don’t fall into the sea.
Sometimes you got to trust yourself.
It ain’t like anywhere else.
It ain’t like anywhere else.”
The Captivating Mrs. Campbell (my wife of 46 years) has been going through some of her old things. This was inspired by having to deal with cleaning out her recently passed mother’s house. Amongst the things that she found was a yellowed Xerox copy on legal sized paper of the speech that then California Governor Ronald Reagan gave at her high school graduation.
The Captivating Mrs. Campbell (CMC) went to a small private girls school in Los Angeles that has now gone very woke and leftist as have all of my Los Angeles Alma Maters. Were he still alive, Reagan would never be allowed to speak there today. There were only about 60 girls in the CMC’s graduating class so it is quite something that the sitting governor of the state at the time spoke at such a small school.
I don’t know how many copies of this speech still exist. As I read it this past week, I was amazed at how many of the issues that Mr. Trump is trying to fix today, were issues for Governor Reagan over 50 years ago.
I have given a few collegiate commencement speeches in my time. They are not easy. You know that many of the graduates couldn’t care less about what you have to say. They want to get the sheepskin and move on to the afterparty. But for those who listen, you want to try to impart whatever bits of wisdom the good Lord has blessed you to learn. You also want to include a few jokes.
Reagan does some of that and he was always very good at a laugh line. But, I want to focus on a few paragraphs that Mr. Trump could say today and they would still be relevant. The speech is nine legal-sized, double-spaced pages long, for those of you old enough to know what that means.
On page 2, he begins to address college professors and says: “Some (professors) interpret their right of speech as an obligation to shake your thinking to reflect their own beliefs. This too, is part of the changing world. There was a time when the highest canons of academia rejected the indoctrination of students with the views of those who taught. The goal then was to teach the student how to think and not what to think.”
He goes on and tells a story of some of his professors whose political beliefs were not displayed and were never known. He concludes that section with this admonition: “Beware of those who will wipeout, or attempt to wipe out, all of your beliefs but leave you with nothing to replace them.”
On Page 3 he gets a bit deeper: “Challenge the morass and customs of the past. Every generation has done so but don’t automatically discard them because they are old. Some of the time-tested values may be irksome at this moment, but we forsake them at our peril. They are values we call civilization and for which men have always been willing to die.”
He goes on in the next paragraph: “There are laws governing us that men didn’t write and therefore men can’t rewrite. We know, for example, that 3x2=6 and sometimes that is inconvenient, but we cannot change it. There are some who know it’s true and they resent it, just as they resent the existing moral order, and the fact that a moral order operating in this year of 1974 is the same moral order that operated 4,000 years ago in 1973 b.c. Through wishful thinking or ignorance we may at times bury the interpretation of that law. But the law remains unchanged and no society can long flaunt the law without inviting its own destruction.”
Long before the Leftist Democrats adopted transgender ideology and rejected “racist” math with the idea that 2+2=5 is simply “another” answer to the problem, Reagan warned these High School seniors about it.
He goes on Page 4: “Actually, a lot of the new freedom we hear about is not freedom and it is not new –– it is a return to the primitive…. This idea we call America… The philosophy of government’s dominance over man would be replaced with the idea of government being man’s servant created by us for our own convenience…. Every standard of measurement confirms this fact, and yet there are those today who would have us believe that this system that has accomplished this has somehow failed and should be replaced by some untried utopian theory.”
It’s as though he was speaking directly to AOC, Karen Bass, Zohran Mamdani and any number of other Neo-Marxist Democrats. The internet and social media came along long after Reagan’s death. But read this from Page 5: “You have been inundated with a flood of rhetoric by the communications media unlike anything any generation has ever experienced before. This is the day of doom and gloom criers. Even so-called entertainment today reflects a world that is grimy and distorted, with violence providing the only excitement.”
As with much in this speech, you could use those exact words to a graduating class in 2025 and it would ring true and relevant. Communications media and entertainment have only gotten worse in the last 50 years. I have long thought it incongruent that Hollywood glorifies violence in much of their content but somehow says that law abiding gun owners are the cause of said violence.
Continuing his assault on the left on Pages 7 and 8: “Because of what some charge as materialism, you are bigger and healthier and brighter and will know more travel and travel farther and live longer than any people who have ever lived. And you will inherit a society that has more churches, more libraries, supports with voluntary contributions more symphonies, operas, non-profit theaters, and publishes more books than all the rest of the world put together…. Beware of those who would cast it aside for some super-planned utopia in which everything that is not compulsory would be prohibited.”
One of the saddest notes I have is that the state for which Reagan served as governor is now the closest to a society where “everything that is not compulsory would be prohibited.”
As part of his conclusion on Page 9: “From time to time there have been individuals who failed a dream –– but the dream has never failed us. A Camelot must not be built by shouting slogans such as ‘Revolution Now.’ It doesn’t come from a bottle or syringe. It is built by everyday people doing everyday things such as extending common courtesy and compassion for others…. Congratulations and may God bless you.”
Obviously, these are only excerpts. He spends more time on each issue I highlighted as well as talking about what his generation saw and did in the world.
So, why did I send this to you other than for its historical interest? Two reasons.
First, Ronald Reagan saw so clearly all of what is good in America and what needed improvement and what threats to the country existed. Reagan gave his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech in October of 1964 in support of Barry Goldwater’s ill fated presidential run. That speech is famous because, just like his not so famous speech to the Marlborough School for Girls, he identified problems and solutions that most others did not see or could not fix. It reminds us of what a generational talent he was.
But second and most importantly, many of the problems and threats he identified are still problems and threats 50 years later. Reagan’s number one challenge as president, of course, was the cold war and the defeat of the Soviet Union. He and Richard Nixon accomplished that.
But as far as indoctrination in education and the corruption of the media and entertainment and the appeal to so many people of the disaster that is socialism and Marxism - those things have only gotten worse. Reagan was forced to deal with a terrible economic downturn when he took office as well as the Soviet threat. He got those done. But the rot in American’s universities and media continues.
Not that Reagan didn’t try. When he was Governor of California, he was at war with the University of California and it’s then-communist (They were literally communist) tendencies for all of his eight years in office. During his tenure, he switched the UC from the semester to the quarter system. UC Berkeley refused to switch. Not because they had a functional problem with the change but because it was Reagan’s idea and they hated anything Reagan proposed. Berkeley is still on the semester system today. Some things never change.
Donald Trump wants to finish the job that Reagan started. He wants to get ideology out of teaching; To establish that natural law cannot be changed by man for political or any other purpose; To expose the media and entertainment for what they have become and encourage people to have thinking independent of their propaganda; and to defeat the old failed thinking of socialism and Neo-Marxism in America once and for all. Reagan identified all of these in 1974. Trump knows how long all of this has been a problem and it is time to win these battles too.
Not many people think of Trump as carrying forward Reagan’s legacy. They were and are very different men. Their styles are very different. They do not align exactly on some things. The threats they faced or face are not identical. But where the threats are still the same, carrying forward the Reagan legacy is exactly what Trump is doing.
Some of you readers loved Reagan and hate Trump. Others loved Trump and did not like Reagan. I would like to suggest that their methods may be different, but their objectives are awfully similar. If you don’t like either one, there is no hope of you.
If you are interested in hearing a recording of the speech, along with some press questions at the time, here is a link to it in the National Archives.
Although we don’t want to leave our heirs too much junk to deal with when we pass on, don’t throw away everything. There may be a few gems there that still have value and application, 50 years later.
I remain respectfully,
Congressman John Campbell
Drive Fast & Live Free
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